


harm reduction

by patrokla



Series: means and methods [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Episode: s04e05 Escape From the Happy Place, Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Other, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 13:18:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18469741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “You want this, but you - don’t want it? It’s very confusing,” the Monster says. It has Quentin pressed up against a maple tree in the park, one long leg between Quentin’s, a broad hand running along the lines of his face. Quentin doesn’t answer - not that he could, because the Monster is pressing a thumb between his lips, pushing against his teeth.or: Eliot is dead. Quentin is helpful.





	harm reduction

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how to explain this, except that I finally watched 4x05 and yet again had a lot of questions, like: what is up with Quentin's mysterious rib (?) injury? Where is Quentin's head at these days? What is the deal with Quentin and the Monster? I wrote some words and deleted some more words and ended up with this, which is really only half a fic, but I had to publish it before I spent another day working on it instead of my actual work. 
> 
> This follows in the same vein of my other fics [refinement : reduction](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18324785) and [emptiness by the handful](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18409370), which are interested in similar questions about Quentin and the Monster, but they aren't integral to understanding this fic (I don't think). 
> 
> Warnings: as the tags say, extremely dubious consent ahead. YMMV on whether there's any real consent at all, given the possession thing, the Monster being...the Monster, and Quentin being under what one might describe as extreme duress and stress. For a much better discussion of Monster/Quentin consent issues I'd recommend greywash's post [here](https://greywash.dreamwidth.org/79455.html).

Once upon a time, Quentin Coldwater walked into a dungeon with a plan to stay there as the companion to a monster for the rest of his life.  
  
Every part of his plan goes wrong, and when Quentin leaves the dungeon he no longer remembers his own name.  
  
He still becomes the monster’s companion.  
  
—  
  
“I would like for you to be helpful, Quentin,” the Monster says, and Quentin tries to take a motionless breath and steel himself internally, where the Monster can’t see him.  
  
Helpful. He can be helpful. Eliot is dead, and Quentin is going to help his murderer. This is life now. He tries to order it in his mind. Eliot is dead, and Quentin is helpful.  
  
He gets it. That’s the new world order. He can almost feel the Monster shuffling through his thoughts curiously, and he thinks _helpful helpful El helpfEl El El_.  
  
“You’ll get used to it,” the Monster reassures him. “You had him, and now you have me. He’s gone, I’m here. Same number of friends.”  
  
And then the Monster is gone, and he’s left sitting alone in a diner booth, and he can move and think freely again. Eliot’s dead. _Same number of friends._ He wishes he could cry, but he’s just so fucking tired. He's really, really tired.  
  
Eliot is dead.  
  
—  
  
“Eliot’s dead,” he tells Julia, and it comes out casually. Easily.  
  
Julia doesn’t question him, probably because she thought Eliot was dead the whole time. She was just waiting for him to stop holding onto a fantasy, like always.  
  
Like always, he’s only managed to let go of it once there’s nothing left. And there truly is nothing left, now. There’s a tiny, tiny part of him that’s grateful Eliot will never have to see just how much nothing there is, how much Quentin has trampled on the memories they made.  
  
—  
  
Here’s the thing: the Monster gets bored easily. Quentin knows this immediately because Brian knew it, because Brian had learned very quickly and painfully that boredom meant bad things.  
  
Unlike Quentin, Brian had been a coward. A self-preservationist. Brian had stood by and watched the Monster kill people, so _many_ people and he’d been horrified, but also grateful that it wasn’t him being killed. Brian was willing to put up with anything, so long as he didn’t die.  
  
Quentin has too many flaws to name, but he is vaguely proud of the fact that he isn’t Brian. He might have _been_ Brian, but he has very different capabilities. Different motivations. Brian had seen that the Monster wanted him and seen a threat. Quentin sees a possibility. The Monster can be focused, and Quentin has gotten good at turning that focus towards himself.    
  
_Don’t hurt them_ , he tells the Monster, _hurt me._  
  
It doesn’t stop there.  
  
—  
  
Quentin doesn’t feel ashamed of being the roadblock in between the Monster and the Monster’s newest idea of a fun time. He can’t really hate himself for that, because he’s already lived the alternative as Brian, and it was so much worse.  
  
Of course it’s hard to make harm reduction sound that heroic - there’s a reason why people would rather be revolutionaries. Quentin certainly doesn’t feel heroic when he drags the Monster’s attention away from handsome men and, more rarely, beautiful women by thinking _don’t touch them, t-touch me_ , which the Monster finds so strange that its attention turns into excitement.  
  
“You don’t want this,” it tells him one afternoon. They’re at a park because the Monster had wanted to feed some birds, but it’d become disinterested when it found out that bird feed was just dried bread and seeds.  
  
It had spotted a man walking his dog, a man that Quentin honestly doesn’t see the appeal of, but it doesn’t matter because the Monster is tilting its head and smiling a little in a way that indicates Danger Ahead, so Quentin does what he has to do.  
  
And so:  
  
“You want this, but you - don’t want it? It’s very confusing,” the Monster says. It has Quentin pressed up against a maple tree in the park, one long leg between Quentin’s, one broad hand running along the lines of his face. Quentin doesn’t answer - not that he could, because the Monster is pressing a thumb between his lips, pushing against his teeth. He lets his mouth fall open a little, and the Monster moves even closer against him, its body one long line of heat.  
  
“This body wants this,” the Monster says confidently, looking down at him, the issue of Quentin’s wanting-not-wanting falling to the wayside, “ _So much._ That’s why this is the best game, Quentin.”  
  
“Mm, mhmm,” Quentin says around the fingers rubbing against his tongue. They taste like blood.  
  
In some other universe, he might’ve found this - arousing, maybe? He knows the body that is learning him so intimately, and sometimes the Monster does things that are echoes of Eliot.  
  
But more often, it does things Eliot never did, tastes and smells like Eliot never had, and between the dissimilarity and the horror and, he thinks, after-effects of Brian’s antidepressants, Quentin just feels disconnected.  
  
The Monster feels - a lot more.  
  
—  
  
Sometimes his distraction attempts go awry, or the Monster goes further than he expected it would. Quentin puts arnica cream on bruises and neosporin on cuts and the Monster watches him, sullen, and says things like “I didn’t _mean_ to,” and “Why don’t you want me to heal it?”  
  
“I just don’t,” Quentin tells it, and “It’s fine, it’s okay,” and “Please, next time, can you not-”  
  
The hard part of this is keeping the Monster from doing it around other people, or from telling other people. He’s not ashamed of what he’s doing, but he’s not proud of it, he realizes. So he tries to keep it hidden, any pain just another reaction to tamp down.  
  
Sometimes he fails. He forgets about bone-deep bruising on his ribs and almost drops the jar with the stone and smattering of blood on the floor of Kady’s kitchen, keeping it from falling by his fingertips and sheer desperation. If it falls, Julia will have questions - that is, if the Monster doesn’t immediately kill them all first. But it doesn’t fall, and Julia’s confusion is quickly replaced by the need to keep the Monster distracted, and so and so and so  
  
Things go on.  
  
—  
  
_Field trips_ , he mouths at Julia, and then, a few minutes later, when the Monster gets hungry and starts going through the fridge, he tells her about it. How it likes new things, how she can misdirect it if it doesn’t actually know what it wants or what it’s supposed to get, and that if it starts to act weird -  
  
“Just tell it that I’ll know what to do,” he murmurs, “Tell it to come ask me. Don’t try and, and de-escalate things, if it gets mad. Placating it is,” _painful_ “um, it’s hard. But I know how to do it.”  
  
“Okay,” Julia says, mouth tilted up with love and questioning concern. He tries to smile at her, tries to project _everything is fine_ , but she doesn’t hear it.  
  
The Monster does. It looks up from where it’s crouched in front of the fridge and says “Everything is _not_ fine.”  
  
“It will be,” Quentin tells it quietly. “We’re going to figure out what to do.”


End file.
